The macOS App Icon Book: An artbook celebrating the art and craft of app icon design

The macOS App Icon Book is a beautiful artbook dedicated to preserving the craft of app icon design. It's a vibrant journey through the art of desktop app iconography for macOS.

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Hi PH, I have clicked the big green 'Launch Campaign' button on the Kickstarter for The macOS App Icon Book— The sequel to The iOS App Icon Book. We smashed through the funding goal in 40 minutes (!) and it's still climbing. With 30 days left on the campaign, the goal is now to push towards as big of a print run as we can make it. Why make this book? After the overwhelming success of The iOS App Icon Book it was clear that I hadn't wasted 4 years hallucinating that this would be a worthwhile endeavour. This art form, which had been a guiding pillar in my career, was luckily something that a lot of other people also had a passion for. The first book took more than 4 years from inception to Kickstarter (and another 4 months to deliver) and so it was with some hesitation that I started making another one. But a book about icons for the platform most of us use to produce our work was important and so preparations got underway right after The iOS App Icon Book had been delivered to backers. I started making desktop icons long before the smartphone was introduced and in many ways the history of icons on macOS is a much longer one, with fewer constraints and more experimentation. The Macintosh popularised the graphical user interface and laid the foundations for how we still use computers to this day. Most of the icons produced for this platform through its winding history are long lost to time. Since those tiny pixels appeared on our computer screens, icons have grown into multi-platform branding elements. Icon design on the Mac has experienced a similar golden age as iOS icon design and we need to preserve this art before it too disappears. macOS and its interface have evolved and so have third-party app icons By collecting this work in a hardcover book, we are turning what was once only digital into something tangible. Something ephemeral into something you can hold. I have found that this process not only elevates the art to its rightful importance but also creates a preservable timecapsule that tells the story of visual design. This has never been more clear to me than after shipping the first book, and these books are more important than ever.

Love this. As someone who just recently designed, built and released my first macOS app, I found the icon design to be extremely fun. I ended up designing like 10+ variations. And it really made me pay attention and study other icons and appreciate the best ones (and notice how the art is getting lost with the cross-platform flattening). This will help preserve the history of the craft. This is something I’d love to have in my library. Nice work.